A new movie from the queer Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar is always a big event for both his fans and avid cineastes. Strange Way of Life, Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming gay western romance is no exception. Starring Ethan Hawke, Pedro Pascal, and Manu Rios, and it will be Almodóvar’s first movie shot in English and it will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Almodóvar, 73, has said that the thirty-minute film is a “queer Western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other.” He also added that Pascal and Hawke’s characters “behave in that situation in an opposite way.”
“It’s about masculinity in a deep sense because the Western is a male genre. What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western: it has the gunslinger, it has the ranch, it has the sheriff.”
“But what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men,” he continued. “And now I think I’m telling you a little bit too much.”
Almodóvar was previously in line to direct the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain – the heartbreaking tale of two shepherds (famously played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) –but he ended up passing the film’s reins to Ang Lee.
Almodovar shared that the desire to make his own gay western originated from the restrictions that hampered what his version of Brokeback Mountain would have been
